It’s odd how one’s memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up — one’s recollections of growth itself — have to be so tragic? I still haven’t found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

Oh, where have you gone, you blissful dreams of future happiness

time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream,

The only way the past can survive and maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to experience the same thing over and over. That is why life has become a bore. Life has become boring because we have made of it a repetitive thing. So what we mistakenly call the present is really the repetitive past projecting a fictitious future. Your goals, your search, your aspirations are cast in that mold.

What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . .

We live in an age when we have forgotten what life is all about.

We were young once and then we weren’t.

"It is beyond doubt that the happiness which love can bestow on its chosen souls is the highest that can fall to mortal's lot. But when I imagine myself in the place of the man who, after twenty happy years, now in one moment loses his all, I am moved almost to say that he is the wretchedest of mortals, and that it is better never to have known such happy days. So it is on this miserable earth: 'the purest joy finds its grave in the abyss of time'. What are we without the hope of a better future?

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. — Lao Tzu; ancient Chinese philosopher,

When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future. When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.